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Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

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Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#291

Post by XCSme »

ckdarby wrote: post #234
XCSme wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the option of buying self-hosted products and installing them on your own server. The setup time is usually the same, but you only pay $5/mo for the server and maybe $100 one time for the product, instead of paying $100/mo for the service. This is also multiplied by X, where X is the number of subscriptions you have.

No. Please do not suggest this ever. Every company I've worked at and that has gone with self-hosted products have lost more money than paying the subscription. Self-hosted nearly never gets upgraded because there's no budget and it can always be cut from the budget because it'll keep functioning. Corp IT who usually get stuck managing these become the gatekeepers. They have nearly zero incentive to upgrade because t…

At the previous company I worked it turned out pretty well. We used Grafana (which is OpenSource) for our high volume in-app analytics and servers monitoring. It took a bit to implement all the graphs, but we had exactly the graphs we needed. Even if we went for a SaaS, we would still have had to implement those custom graphs in their interface.

We have also paid (a lot) for DeltaDNA to have more insights into monetization, but their platform was a lot slower than our self-hosted Grafana and they even forced us to use our own S3 buckets to store the data (set them up and link them) due to GDPR (they said). Not only that, but creating custom graphs in their platform was very tedious and a bad experience overall.

I am not saying it makes sense to always go self-hosted, you are right that depending on the application you want to host you might need less or more technical knowledge and maintenance.

I would never recommend (for the average individual/company) to self-host email servers, CDNs or Slack chat server alternatives, but I do think for some applications it's worth the time, for example static pages (instead of using a website builder get a theme and host it yourself) or analytics.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#292

Post by XCSme »

lvs wrote: post #251
ckdarby wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Please do not suggest this ever. Every company I've worked at and that has gone with self-hosted products have lost more money than paying the subscription. Self-hosted nearly never gets upgraded because there's no budget and it can always be cut from the budget because it'll keep functioning. Corp IT who usually get stuck managing these become the gatekeepers. They have nearly zero incentive to upgrade because t…

We self-host everything and have refused requests to update to subscription products. Our systems are our responsibility, so outsourcing to a SaaS that will die or get hacked tomorrow is enormous unquantifiable risk compared to the little opportunity costs of self-hosting.

On a less serious note, self-hosting also feels more like you do own your business, have full control over your products and are not just a merchant buying low and selling high.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#293

Post by tryitnow »

crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

I think it may depend on the company and on how these "averages" are calculated.

For a company where almost all the workforce is white collar then yes, $10K seems reasonable. In fact, I'm surprised it's not more.

For a company like Wal-Mart, I'd be shocked to see that much spend on software subscription.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#294

Post by nradov »

a1369209993 wrote: post #288
nradov wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read up on the history Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System (C3). The team worked for 7 years and although they achieved some technical goals they never managed to deliver a working payroll system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens... Payroll is harder than it looks due to all the edge cases. For example, it is literally possible for an employee to have so many payroll deductions incl…

> For example, it is literally possible for an employee to have so many payroll deductions including court-ordered wage garnishment that net pay would be negative. How do you handle that in all legal jurisdictions where the company operates? By issuing a error and demanding that a human deal with it. Obviously.

Surely you jest? If that was a serious comment then you obviously have no understanding of the business and legal requirements for payroll systems.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#295

Post by XCSme »

XCSme wrote: post #209
robbiemitchell wrote: post #179

You know what costs way more than SaaS? Hiring, managing, and losing people. Leveraging high-quality people with tooling, both for individual functions and for company-wide process, is a no-brainer.

There is also the option of buying self-hosted products and installing them on your own server. The setup time is usually the same, but you only pay $5/mo for the server and maybe $100 one time for the product, instead of paying $100/mo for the service. This is also multiplied by X, where X is the number of subscriptions you have.

Just a small remark: I think usually not the X multiplier is the important factor in making the decision to go self-hosted, but the price, privacy, lack of features or poor performance or availability of the service.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#296

Post by adjkant »

prostheticvamp wrote: post #285
swiley wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS office is probably one of them. Office 365 isn’t worth it but most people don’t seem to know that.

For whom is it not worth it? Software devs? Are they representative of the average white collar? I couldn’t live without excel.

Sheets will fit a lot of excel use cases for those not doing serious heavy lifting with it.

FWIW, I'm a software engineer and our IT department actually let people opt out of Microsoft office if they weren't using it to save money, and encouraging people to use Google Docs/Sheets (as most do anyways). I'm guessing a good deal of software engineers did that but there are plenty of non-engineers that probably also did outside of finance / some sales people.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#297

Post by 2ion »

Balvarez wrote: post #61

It seems to me companies should instead invest in open source alternatives. They could pay less, funding the development of open source alternatives and everyone wins. Blender is a good example of this.

"Invest" is the correct word. You take on a complex software with zero guarantees, zero support, outdated documentation and basically have to do it all yourself: analyzing the quality of the thing, making it seaworthy by developing a deployment if needed, testing it, migrating it, etc etc. The boss's boss's eyes glazed over when I said free and open source but he got a reality check when I told him no, significant cost accrues elsewhere.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#298

Post by jonathankoren »

prostheticvamp wrote: post #285
swiley wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS office is probably one of them. Office 365 isn’t worth it but most people don’t seem to know that.

For whom is it not worth it? Software devs? Are they representative of the average white collar? I couldn’t live without excel.

I use spreadsheet programs all the time during software development. it's a great way to quickly look at data or do some calculations.

I use Numbers. Is it as good as Excel, not really, but it's good enough (although data import is still a bit lacking), and it's not a subscription.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#299

Post by adjkant »

adwf wrote: post #281
owenmarshall wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're just renting payroll, purchasing, etc software for that price it'd be far cheaper to roll your own, or pay a few people to work on OSS full time. This is the kind of hubris I come to this site for.

Hubris is half of software development ;)

Is the other half the hole of legacy support you dig yourself into supporting the bad decisions and naive assumptions you made driving with that hubris?

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#300

Post by iamaelephant »

crazygringo wrote: post #247

Look, either it's worth it or it's not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn't be buying them if they weren't providing more value than they cost. But: > enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software Sorry but I can't wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000 /year. A…

> Between Office and cloud and HR/payroll and a few other tools I can imagine $1,000/year.

Really? You can imagine only #83/mo in software costs for a working professional? I think you're being really rather unimaginative.

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